Visualizing node attribute uncertainty in graphs

Abstract:

Visualizations can potentially misrepresent information if they ignore or hide the uncertainty that are
usually present in the data. While various techniques and tools exist for visualizing uncertainty in
scientific visualizations, there are very few tools that primarily focus on visualizing uncertainty in
graphs or network data. With the popularity of social networks and other data sets that are best
represented by graphs, there is a pressing need for visualization systems to show uncertainty that are
present in the data. This paper focuses on visualizing a particular type of uncertainty in graphs - we
assume that nodes in a graph can have one or more attributes, and each of these attributes may have an
uncertainty associated with it. Unlike previous efforts in visualizing node or edge uncertainty in graphs
by changing the appearance of the nodes or edges, e.g. by blurring, the approach in this paper is to use
the spatial layout of the graph to represent the uncertainty information. We describe a prototype tool
that incorporates several uncertainty-to-spatial-layout mappings and describe a scenario showing how it
might be used for a visual analysis task.